Lost Art Press

Category: Make a Chair from a Tree

Harvesting Hickory Bark

Posted on by fitz
Hickory bark seats on post-and-rung pieces in Jennie Alexander’s shop. Photo by Narayan Nayar

The following is excerpted from the third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree,” by Jennie Alexander (though for this chapter in particular we are indebted to Peter Follansbee – he’s shown doing the work here!).

This third edition of Alexander’s “MACFAT” is the culmination of a lifetime’s work on post-and-rung chairs, covering in detail every step of the green-wood chairmaking process – from splitting and riving parts to making graceful cuts with a drawknife and spokeshave, to brace-and-bit boring for the solid joinery, to hickory-bark seat weaving.

With the help of Larry Barrett, one of her devoted students, she worked on this new version of the book until just weeks before her 2018 death. Larry polished Jennie’s final manuscript, then built a chair in Jennie’s shop using her techniques and tools as we took many of the photographs for this book. Nathaniel Krause (another of Jennie’s devoted students), wove the hickory seat for this book. Longtime friend and collaborator Peter Follansbee helped to edit the text into the intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) words that ended up in this third edition.

Post-and-rung chairs usually have fiber seats. Ash or oak splints are sometimes used. I also remember a beautiful American elm inner bark that Dave Sawyer used. Woven hemp tape is a beautiful natural tan and is long-lasting. Canvas tape, sometimes referred to as Shaker tape, comes in various widths and colors. Rush seats are favored in many cultures. The inner bark of hickory trees makes a very beautiful seat and is my personal favorite. I find it the best seating of all. It is strong, long lasting and attractive. Harvesting it yourself is a challenge.

Harvesting Hickory Bark
Harvesting your own hickory bark is the ultimate experience in seating this chair. First, this is seasonal work. The cambium layer is slick in the spring and early summer and that’s bark season. Then you must find a suitable hickory tree. A tree too large is difficult to manage. I look for something 1′ or less in diameter. Like the logs for our chair, it needs to be straight and clear, and in this case, the longer the better.

Here one end of the sapling is propped on a trestle, the other on a riving brake.
Here some of the bark strips on the right have already been removed. But you can see the pattern on the inner bark that’s used as a guide for the thickness.

After you fell the tree, you can work on the log in place in the woods. If you can manage it, it’s best to take the log back to your shop. When you are done, the wood awaits you for chairmaking. Harvesting bark is slow, careful work. I like to position the log at a comfortable height. Sometimes I cobble up a few X-supports to raise the horizontal log to low chest height. You get a better view.

Drawknife the corky outer bark until you see the criss-cross fiber pattern of inner bark. Experiment with a short section to decide how much outer bark to remove. It is difficult to drawknife down to the correct thickness without cutting through the inner bark. In many trees, drawknifing until there is an equal width of the interlocking light and dark strands of bark fiber will result in a good, even thickness. I aim for a thickness of about 1/16.”

Once the outer bark has been removed, you are ready to cut the strips of inner bark. Strips about 3/4″ wide will make a good seat; they usually shrink in width a little so not narrower than that. Use a knife to slit the bark into strips along the trunk. Catch the point of the knife in the long fibers of the sapwood and, within reason, let them guide the knife.

Picking up in mid-stream again, with some strips already peeled. Score the width with the point of a knife. Make sure you cut all the way through the bark’s thickness.

I made a knife with a long handle. I rest the handle on my shoulder. I clamp down on the middle of the knife handle and make two cuts down to the cambium layer where all is slippery. It doesn’t matter if you cut down into sapwood. Lift one end of this first exploratory strip; it’s no more difficult than peeling a banana. How thick is it? If it’s too thick, lay it back down and thin it down some more. The bottom of the strip will need no attention, it will be smooth. It is amazing how it slides off the tree.

Poke your knife just under the end of the strip, then lift it up. Is it too thick? Or just right?

When you are stripping, work carefully around the knot holes and other defects. If possible, do not terminate the strip to remove the defect. Instead, widen the strip to enclose the defect and then return to the proper width. We want all strips, defects and all, as long as possible. When you weave the strips into the seat, you may be able to work the defects under the seat and save long inner bark strips. If not possible, then cut the defect out.

Carefully work along the sapling, lifting the strip as you go. Keep your knife handy in case you have to snip here and there to free the strip.

You are using the tree as your work surface. So, lift the strip slowly off the tree. As you do so, use your knife to clean up defects and variations in thickness and width.

Coils of hickory bark. Keep them dry until you need them.

This is the best time of all to finish the bark for seat readiness. Barking is the most tedious part of chairmaking and the most rewarding. But good bark is like leather and it’s well worth the effort. Wrap and tie the bark strips into coils for storage. Keep them in a dry place to avoid mold.

A Simple Kiln

Posted on by fitz
My kiln is just insulation board, duct tape, one light bulb in a reflector (120°F is all you need), and some sticks poked through the sides to elevate parts. There’s a meat thermometer poked through the top. The kiln sits on top of a milk crate; the light’s reflector hangs in a hole in the kiln’s bottom. JA’s had a dimmer switch – but why complicate things?

The following is excerpted from the third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” – a book Jennie Alexander somewhat reluctantly agreed to in 2014. In 1978, her seminal book on green woodworking launched the careers of thousands of woodworkers and helped ignite a green woodworking movement in this country. Her reluctance to a third edition wasn’t due to a lack of passion for the book’s subject – the simple but gorgeous object that we now call a Jennie Chair had been an obsession of hers for decades. She simply didn’t know if she was physically and mentally up to the task of essentially starting from scratch on a new book – she had learned so much since the first two editions were published that this is an almost entirely new book. Thus, “Make a Chair From a Tree: Third Edition” is the culmination of a lifetime’s work on post-and-rung chairs, covering in detail every step of the green-wood chairmaking process – from splitting and riving parts to making graceful cuts with a drawknife and spokeshave, to brace-and-bit boring for the solid joinery, to hickory-bark seat weaving.

With the help of Larry Barrett, one of her devoted students, she worked on this new version of the book until just weeks before her 2018 death. Larry polished Jennie’s final manuscript, then built a chair in Jennie’s shop using her techniques and tools as we took many of the photographs for this book. Nathaniel Krause (another of Jennie’s devoted students), wove the hickory seat for this book. Longtime friend and collaborator Peter Follansbee helped to edit the text into the intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) words that ended up in this third edition.

We know Jennie would be delighted by the contributions from the people she taught and who, in turn, inspired her. (Though we also suspect she’d say we should just start rewriting the book at the beginning…. again.)

There is no kiln in the first edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree.” Notes indicate JA was striving to get the rungs drier at assembly than they would be in the life of the chair, what we later came to call “super-dry.” JA made notes on different techniques chairmakers she met used, including one who dried rungs on the tin roof in the summertime. One of the first kilns JA used was the wood-fired kiln probably developed by Drew Langsner, used in various configurations by Langsner, Alexander and Dave Sawyer in the early years of Country Workshops.

After using it in the first class in 1979 Alexander briefly described it in a letter to friends:

“We made a kiln from cinder blocks and roof tin and chicken wire. After burning up some test rungs (JA certified perfectos) we installed the clay floor and cut back the heat. Fired by scraps & tended every hour (day & night) it worked very well. Very little checking on the rungs.”

I was a student in JA’s second chairmaking class there (1980). The kiln figures in one of my stellar moments in that class. It was the “tended every hour (day & night)” part that got me. We set up a nighttime schedule for the tent-camping crowd of scruffy would-be chairmakers. An alarm clock was given to the first student who would go tend the fire in the night. Then this person would reset the clock to sound off in another hour and tuck it into the tent of the next person on the rotation. Brilliant me, I decided that I’d take one of the earlier shifts, then be able to get back to sleep for some uninterrupted rest until morning. Except I slept through the alarm. I remember waking up way after my allotted slot, huffing & puffing to get the fire up again, and then turning the clock over to the next person. Several students got a full night’s sleep when they weren’t expecting it.

Chairmaker’s kilns have come a long way since. Most are over my head, and because I only make a couple of chairs at a time, beyond my needs. The one I use is based on the kiln Alexander featured in the afterword to the 1994 edition of MACFAT. I forget who came up with it; there’s reference to it (and other kilns) in Langsner’s “The Chairmaker’s Workshop.” I’ve dried chair rungs on the dashboard of my car in the summertime. I don’t have a tin roof.

– Peter Follansbee

Resources for Making a ‘Jennie Chair’

Posted on by fitz
A chair made by Jennie Alexander, author of “Make a Chair from a Tree.”

We’re proud to offer two resources for making Jennie Alexander-style chairs: The third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” and the how-to video Jennie recorded in 1999. We’re also fans of a new video from one of Jennie’s long-time collaborators and friend, Peter Follansbee.

MACFAT: The Book
In 2014, Jennie Alexander somewhat reluctantly agreed to a third edition of her 1978 seminal book on green woodworking, “Make a Chair From a Tree” (MACFAT) – a book that launched the careers of thousands of woodworkers and helped ignite a green woodworking movement in this country.

Her reluctance wasn’t due to a lack of passion for the book’s subject – the simple but gorgeous object that we now call a Jennie Chair had been an obsession of hers for decades. She simply didn’t know if she was physically and mentally up to the task of essentially starting from scratch on a new book – she had learned so much since the first two editions were published that this is an almost entirely new book.

Thus, “Make a Chair From a Tree: Third Edition” is the culmination of a lifetime’s work on post-and-rung chairs, covering in detail every step of the green-wood chairmaking process – from splitting and riving parts to making graceful cuts with a drawknife and spokeshave, to brace-and-bit boring for the solid joinery, to hickory-bark seat weaving.

With the help of Larry Barrett, one of her devoted students, she worked on this new version of the book until just weeks before her 2018 death. Larry polished Jennie’s final manuscript, then built a chair in Jennie’s shop using her techniques and tools as we took many of the photographs for this book. Nathaniel Krause (another of Jennie’s devoted students), wove the hickory seat for this book. Longtime friend and collaborator Peter Follansbee helped to edit the text into the intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) words that ended up in this third edition.

We know Jennie would be delighted by the contributions from the people she taught and who, in turn, inspired her. (Though we also suspect she’d say we should just start rewriting the book at the beginning…. again.)

MACFAT: The Video
The 1999 video “Make a Chair from a Tree” is based on Jennie’s book and the courses that she taught. Jennie taught post-and-rung chairmaking for 25 years at her shop in Baltimore and around the country. During that time she refined and simplified the process, and those improvements are incorporated into this video. The construction of the chair incorporates wet and dry mortise-and-tenon joinery and interlocking joints that result in an elegant but simple chair that will last for years. 

This two-hour video, produced by Jennie, Anatol Polillo and ALP Productions, takes the viewer through the entire chairmaking process, beginning with a log, then riving and shaving the posts, rungs and slats. You will see all of the techniques and methods needed to create a chair, including steam bending, horizontal boring and seat weaving. The entire chair is built using only hand tools and traditional techniques.

It also comes with a pdf (delivered at checkout) that shows many of the jigs and part sizes discussed. Lost Art Press offer the video via streaming; a DVD is available through ALP Productions.

‘Making a Jennie Alexander Chair with Peter Follansbee’ Video
In his new video, “Making a Jennie Alexander Chair with Peter Follansbee,” Peter takes a deep dive into all the details of making a Jennie Chair, and shares some of his personal history with Jennie. Peter has been making and teaching these chairs for decades, and has developed his own approaches and touches to the form Jennie popularized, including some improved techniques. Plus he shows how both how to harvest and process hickory bark, and how to use it to weave the seat. It’s almost nine hours of detailed video instruction.


What’s Your Chair’s Janka Rating?

Posted on by Lost Art Press

During the last two decades I’ve entered the orbit of many chairmakers who make Jennie Chairs (from “Make a Chair From a Tree”) and Windsor/Forest chairs. Years ago, I was in a gaggle of them, and they started talking about how little their chairs weighed.

I learned that Jennie Chairs that have been stripped down to their essence can weigh about 5 lbs. A few people have broken that barrier and gotten them below 5 lbs., but it’s apparently tricky to do it without splitting the posts during assembly.

Some Windsor/Forest chairmakers have similar obsessions with making chairs that weigh as little as possible. Because of the massive and solid seat, however, the makers I have talked with usually aspire for about 8 lbs. of material.

How much do my stick chairs weigh? I had no idea until people started asking me. Sure, I’ve shipped a bunch of them, so I know how much the crate, chair and packing material weighs (about 60 lbs.). But the chair itself? It weighs about yea much. As much as a chair made of oak, walnut or cherry should. A child, adult or aged person can move it around without too much trouble. You can pick it up. You can stand on it. It’s not made out of collapsed star material.

I didn’t know there was a contest to make the waif-iest chair possible. (Of course, I’m oblivious to sports. So it might be a personal defect – I’m missing the “competition” gene.)

Recently some Jennie Chair makers were again chatting with me about how incredibly lightweight their chairs were. One of them asked me how much my chairs weighed. 

“Weight?” I replied. “Bah. What’s more important is the pH of your chair. If you don’t understand the ‘potential of hydrogen’ of your chairs, then I don’t even know what to say.”

This is why I don’t get many invitations to parties.

My chairs weigh about 15 lbs. Unless you have had surgery recently, you should be able to pick them up OK.

— Christopher Schwarz

Stick Chairs vs. Coors Light

Posted on by Lost Art Press

“I do not get your weird chairs,” exclaim about a dozen messages or comments every year.

I understand your bewilderment. 

I remember being a prospective student at Northwestern University in 1985 where I had been paired up with freshmen journalism students. We were supposed to sleep in their dorm rooms and see what university life was like.

My two hosts sat me down on a bed and thrust a Budweiser in my hands. 

“Drink it,” they said. “And you’re drinking 10 more. You are getting drunk. Maybe we’ll drag you outside naked.”

Up until that point in my life I had taken one sip of beer. It had been my dad’s Coors Light, which had been poured over ice at the beach during a vacation. It was memorably disgusting.

I took a sip of the Budweiser, and I can still remember the metallic and bitter liquid spreading through my mouth and snaking down my gullet. 

Beer is objectively nasty stuff. It’s basically watery bread. Fermented starch. And flavored with a bitter plant (hops) or worse.

I did not “get” this weird drink, and I took about four sips of it that night, each one warmer and worse than the previous. I did not end up naked and drunk in the quad.

Now 37 years after that fall evening, I have changed my mind about beer. I am endlessly curious about the different forms of the drink and enjoy learning about its role in our culture and history. After listening to a podcast about beer in Biblical times, I was struck by the parallels between the history of the beverage and of the vernacular stick chairs I have been studying and building for many years. 

I suppose these parallels shouldn’t have been a surprise. The stories of many good things in our world have a similar arc. And the turning point in the story’s third act is always the Industrial Revolution. 

But it’s a good story, and it helps explain my love for both hops and these funky chairs that are “a smidgen off being ugly,” according to chairmaker Chris Williams.

A craft beer and a carving of a stick chair by Rudy Everts.

For most of human history, beer was something you made at home. Everyone was a brewer. Beer was a source of nutrition and hydration. But ancient beer was unlikely to taste like the stuff you buy today. For a long time the role of yeast wasn’t understood. And hops – the most common added flavor today – weren’t always used. Honey and other spices were common.

Commercial production of beer might have been an innovation of the Ancient Egyptians (you can read a history of beer and business here, which is where much of the following business data comes from). But up until the mid-19th century, most brewers were local businesses. There were no national or international brands of beer. 

The rapid industrialization of the West allowed beer to be produced on a large scale and homogenized. Prohibition wiped out most of the local and regional brewers. And by the 1970s, 75 percent of all the beer in the United States was produced by only four monster corporations.

The product also kind of sucked. Coors Light over ice?

My kids, pretending to be drunk while in Germany.

And while those macro brewers still exist (and are still growing through acquisition and consolidation), there has been a remarkable renaissance in small- and mid-sized brewers. In 1980, there were only 92 breweries in the U.S. As of 2021, there were 9,247 breweries. A hundredfold increase.

Plus beer as a beverage is far more interesting and diverse these days.

The history of stick chairs is not as long as the history of brewing (as far as we know). But it also has some wild twists and turns. 

The first image of a stick chair that I know of is from a Welsh book of laws from the 12th or 13th century called “Laws of Hywel Dda.” There are two images of stick chairs shown in this particular Latin translation. My favorite one shows a judge in the stick chair, and he’s pointing with one hand. His other hand holds what is likely a book (but which I prefer to think of as a cup of beer for the purposes of this story).

From “Laws of Hywel Dda.”

Stick chairs have been around for hundreds of years before mass manufacturing. We suspect that most were made by farmers in the off-season, so it was a household enterprise, much like making beer. Judging from the surviving examples, they were made by crafty individuals who likely made the chairs for their nuclear or extended family. Or for people in their village.

Because each stick chair is unique – I’ve never seen two that are identical – we can conclude that they were likely made one-by-one. Or in small sets at most. There are variations in the chairs that can place them in certain time periods or in certain regions. But there’s little to no evidence that these chairs were even a highly organized commercial endeavor. (Irish Gibson chairs might be the exception.)

These vernacular chairs show up in many countries throughout Scandinavia and the UK. And stick chairs could be the ancient ancestor of Forest chairs (aka Windsor chairs). 

Danish stick chair.

Regardless of the shape or strength of that family tree, Windsor chairs appeared in the early 18th century and rapidly became a commercial enterprise that employed hundreds and then thousands of people. The city of High Wycombe became Britain’s primary chairmaking region. But the chairs were manufactured all over the UK and were a major export for the country. 

The Windsor chair became so successful that today it is widely regarded as the most common form of chair. 

“It’s been said that half of all wooden chairs on the planet are either Windsors or are directly descended from the style,” according to the Magazine Antiques. 

An early Windsor (and a personal favorite).

While there are exceptions, most mass-produced Windsor chairs are unremarkable firewood and share little or nothing with their ancient ancestors – except for a name. 

Evidence: All of the broken chairs that have been dragged across my doorstep have been factory-made Windsors. (I decline all chair-repair requests from customers – not because I am a jerk, but because chair repair could easily consume all of my waking hours.) 

These factory-made Windsors are the Coors Light of the woodworking world.

Just like with the world of beer, however, things began to improve for the world of handmade chairs in the 1970s and 80s. Mike Dunbar and Dave Sawyer began exploring Windsor forms, and both began teaching others, planting the seeds for thousands of other chairmakers. John Brown self-published his “Welsh Stick Chairs” book, which began to sketch in the early history of chairs from his part of the world.

Mike Dunbar at work.

And now we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to chairmaking instruction and tools. Well-made Windsor chairs and stick chairs are much easier to find. And the chairs are available at a variety of price points.

Plus there are now a lot of talented chairmakers out there that I have never heard of – and I try to keep up.

I get the same feeling when I visit my local beer store. The shelves are brimming with interesting beers from all over the country. I’ve heard of maybe 10 percent of them. There is so much good stuff out there to try. 

It’s quite amazing, really. Well, that is until I look across the aisle of the store and see the mountains and mountains of Coors Light there, too.

— Christopher Schwarz